Personal Narrative

Mildred Emory Persinger

Name:

             If you want to start from the day I was born its Mildred Tillman Emory Persinger. There was somebody at Hollins who called herself Tillman when I was at Hollins, which was also her middle name, so I didn’t use my middle name.  I though that was enough Tillmans for one campus.

Childhood:

            I could say I grew up to be, the girl with the pearls.  They were talking about pearls last night and we know that that’s a stereotype, so here I was born in Roanoke.  My father was from eastern shore of Maryland.   My mother was from eastern North Carolina and we, used to visit *back and forth motion of hands* those places to see our grandparents.  The thing I could say about my parents was, despite the fact that they were both southerners I never heard a single word that you could consider racist.  It was a normal childhood.

We moved from Atlanta Georgia where my father was working, to New York.  Not to New York City but to Long Island when he was transferred to New York by his company and I grew up in a very restricted town called Garden City. In those days before the Civil Rights laws were passed you could tell, the real estate agents not to sell to any property to Jews or blacks, or Asians so you had a WASPy community that didn’t teach you much.  Except the kind of people you were surrounded with and when, we moved back to Salem, Virginia near Hollins, I was quite amazed.  It was culture shock to find out the people who were my parents’ friends were poor, or not so poor, or all the same color, except for the wonderful people who worked for us, but it was a totally different community of all kinds of people instead of these WASPs.

            My mother was a volunteer when we lived in Garden City in the school but I can’t say that was social change. My father was a very tolerant and a wonderful man who if he had time, which he didn’t he probably would have, oh, I know what he did.  here’s what he did: he went to the county jail to read with them and-a bring them outside information and magazines and the things that they thought would make their lives easier and that I would say was, sort of social change.

Could you tell me a little bit about how your family responded to your social change work?

            Oh, well my husband he made it all possible because he never required me to get a job to help support the family so I was able to get wonderful jobs because I didn’t have to be paid.

            /giggles/ In fact he said he didn’t have to do it because I was doing enough for two people. /Laughter/ I invited him to say something but he declined /laughter/

How have your children reacted to your social change work?

             Well they considered it quite normal. Our daughter joined the voters to work with them on changing laws.  She declined to be president because she knew she wouldn’t be able to do the thing she liked best: she edited the newsletter so she could put in the type of thing she hoped that they would act on.   She attended a convention in New York one year and I went with her and it happened that we were both working *pointing on table with a back-and-forth motion* on the same topic which was disarmament, the most hopeless goal in the world! And she is a very rigorous kind of education for us.  We had to really understand all the treaties, what the United States was doing to keep its promise, which he never kept, to cut down on its nuclear arsenal and I had no idea that she was doing it cause she just did it.  Until she came to the convention and we both went to the same workshop.

Richard Persinger: Now I’d like to tell a story. It took place at the meeting of the League of Voters in New York. When Mildred was out there she and her friends developed a resolution and somebody said “Louise you should introduce it because you seem to understand it better than the rest of us” and she said “I should because Mildred Persinger is my mother.”

/laughter/

M: I wouldn’t have told that story. /more laughter/ but it might help.

Daughter

            Unfortunately she died.  When she, for reasons unknown, *cage-like hand on table* because they have no idea what causes it, she had multiple sclerosis which is a deterioration of nerves.  It was about 15 years when she was able to function fairly normally. But she was failing, gradually went down hill and she died 3 or 4 years ago. And-a we set up a little memorial for her, for the physics department; her and her mother-in-law together because her mother-in-law was the head of the physics department since she was here, because she married the son of her major professor.   Which, is one of the great stories of how you get a husband at Hollins. /laughter/

            It was quite exciting because Charles Montgomery, who was the son of Dorothy Montgomery, who was the head in those days of the physics department, who had at that time had just received his P.H.D. from CalTech.  And he came to Hollins right after that from California and they needed someone to teach a certain part of the physics courses and he, with his fresh P.H.D. was highly qualified and Louise happened to be in his class.  And she said she didn’t dare ask him a question because she would get a 55 minute answer. /laughter/ She felt like he had a lot to learn /laughter/ but! It happened she said that every time there was performance in the Little Theatre where there were tickets she would discover that her seat was right next to his, and then when the Physics Department would have a party or some kind of a celebration she would always be sent with him to buy the food.  So, she reported this to me and I thought “Ah, her major professor has an idea about her son’s future but she’s not telling.”  /laughter/ But when I accused Dorothy of throwing them together she denied it. It was all his idea.

            Well, I always say when these 17-year-olds think they have to go to a coed school to get a husband, I always say: well of course, the first thing an education should do for you is not to produce your husband right away and the second thing is that our daughter found her husband on a, single sex campus.

Can you tell me what made you decide to come to Hollins and what life was like here?

            Oh, I was already admitted or I was offered a scholarship at Mt Holyoake and an alumna of Hollins lived in our town in Garden City, Long Island.  She was determined that I was going to go to Hollins.  And so she had the New York alumnae association offer me a scholarship.  And so I had to choose between Hollins and Mt. Holyoake. Since we had already lived in this area I knew how beautiful it was and how beautiful campus was, even though Mt. Holyoake was a beautiful campus too, but I really wanted to get back to the Blue Ridge Mountains.  And so I said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to Mt. Holyoake.

            It was a very exciting time at Hollins because the college the year we entered had just become a public institution.  In contrast to the family business that the Cocke family had established, course they didn’t establish it as a business.  Charles Lewis Cocke really wanted women educated and when Dick’s grandmother was at Hollins in 1863, during the Civil War she stayed until 1865, she wrote in a letter that she had as her professor for mathematics Dr. Cocke or President Cocke or whatever she called him.  I realized he was serious if he was offered higher mathematics to these young women.

            It was very exciting time because the college had just been transferred to a board of directors from the family and of course some of the family was on the board but that meant that they had to be accredited by the Eastern State’s *circling hand movement* accreditation group, whatever it’s name is now.  They had to have a faculty that had certain standards, a lot of the faculty had been members of the Cocke family who happened to have good degrees, but they wanted an independent group some.  so they employed, a number of new faculty members with wonderful education credentials.              Well, it was 1935 to 1939 and they had new faculty who were rather determined to make this college from a family institution, family-run, to a really topnotch school and they put a lot of wonderful ideas into our heads that we might not have had.  And so we were a little bit, we considered ourselves*clucks tongue* a little bit of a revolutionary group and we, were, pretty, contemptuous of some of the old traditions, which is a normal way to behave in college.  We decided that May Day was the absolute bottom up, where you elected a May Queen on the basis of her looks, and so we decided that we need to put some teeth into May Day and make it academic rather than purely a beauty contest. So, I had the idea of the people who put May Day on in those days were Freya which partly gave Freya a bad name because their big job was putting on May Day. /laugh/ Also we didn’t have Phi Beta Kappa then so in order to be in Freya you had to have top grades so that made a problem because some of the people you really wanted (in Freya) were not very good students.  They were wonderful people but not good students.  Anyway!  We tired to get the English Department, *taps table* the Art Department, *taps table* the music people, all the departments *taps table* of the college to cooperate on May Day and put on something.  I decided the most suitable thing to put on was an imitation of an English masque. Where they had all those animals and funny structures and so on, a Shakespearian type of event and we really pulled it off.  But the main thing we accomplished, some people told me it was the first time, that all these departments had co-operated on any project.  And you could say interdisciplinary effort *tap table* was worth whatever we put into it because it brought them together and they got the idea that they could work together, in future.  This was some kind of accomplishment.

Grad school

            I went to Brynmawr *holds table*, which is also a women’s college.  Brynmawr could call itself a university like Hollins but they chose not to because they actually grant a P.H.D. in a number of fields. So the professors from the very beginning of Brynmawr, which is not as old as Hollins but pretty old place, every professor in those days was qualified to work with P.H.D. students and to offer various programs that you really need to go through supervise final doctorate thesis and structural thesis and so on.  It really was a very rigorous institution. Somebody yesterday asked me if I was a bluestocking and I didn’t know what that meant except that the joke about the Brynmawr students was that they were all bluestockings *makes a gesture suggesting a line* because Brynmawr didn’t care what kind of an all-round student you were they wanted somebody who was very *leans over and gestures to Allie* very good in a certain field so that they could have a bunch of stars, which they did.  We had some very funny looking girls there.  But at Hollins at that time they were all the ones with the pearls, the beauty queens, gorgeous, gorgeous people and Hollins now looks more like the regular population /laughter/ but *makes “safe” gesture* I used to think do these good looking women apply to Hollins because they were the way they were or did Hollins just choose on the basis of looks?  /laughter/ I never could decided that but very few odd looking characters at Hollins in those days and the Hollins students got the reputation for being really, really attractive and the guys all wanted to date them.  It gave (the guys) a certain prestige to date Hollins students, it was old fashioned. /laugh/

YWCA

            Well actually you’re, (pause) the YWCA didn’t do the kind of program that they did at Randolph-Macon *touch her glasses then swings her hand in front of herself* because at Randolph-Macon they had a, what they call a Secretary for the YWCA.  In other words she was an employed professional for that campus and it turned out because she was there the YWCA ran the campus: all the social activities, all the various clubs, and so on because she was available to support them and help them.  Hollins didn’t do that because we didn’t have a paid professional and so it was just a little bit of money raising for good works but not the kind of program they were doing at Randolph Macon and on many other *says to Allie* campuses.  On the big universities they had a lot of professional YWCA people working with the young women but it was Hollins that got me into the YWCA.  I would never- it would have never occurred to me because one of the faculty had previously been on the YWCA, the national *taps table* YWCA, staff and she wrote a letter to them, to the national board, saying that we were coming to New York and once we were married.  And when we got into our apartment in New York I had a letter in my mailbox inviting me to be on the ‘race relations’ committee.  And that was the beginning of my interest.

            I told somebody that my first assignment was to write a paper on peonage in Louisiana.  And here I was right out of graduate school, I’d been teaching down at Auburn University for a year only, but I didn’t really have a very clear idea of what peonage was.  I knew it was sort of semi-slavery, so I went to the public library and I took my long yellow sheets and I took notes and I wrote this paper on the (peonage system).  And the main thrust was that these workers in the turpentine groves were so in debt due to the fact that the gang bosses who had recruited them required them to buy all their food at the company store, very over priced, they could never catch up.  They were always having to work to pay their bills at the company store and so it held *wide gesture* them there in virtual captivity.  In order to be able catch up, which they could never do. So I wrote *taps table* this paper, 3 or 4 pages.  About 5 years ago *holds up one finger* I went to a YWCA event where I met the person who had been my staff director on this race relations committee her name was, never mind, she, opened her purse when she saw me and she handed me those yellow pages of my original report /laugh/ that I had written in 1942.  She kept it all these years when she moved, when she became president of the YWCA but she moved to Illinois, when she left her office that was one of the things she took! /laugh/ Why she kept it I don’t know, but I have it my first out of college (paper).  So they asked *drag pencil and tap on table* you to do things you couldn’t do, always they asked you to do things you never had any experience doing so you learned and I stayed on the board for 20 years on the National Board.  And mostly I was doing public policy and so I had to give testimony in congress and write articles and make speeches and push an agenda.  and the agenda was mostly Civil Rights and we got a lot done because we had 2 and ½ million members, most of whom voted so they listened and in those days you really didn’t have to have money to be listened *jab finger on table* to in Washington.  You had to have votes and we used our votes.

Two years as a teacher

            The first one was more or less a disaster.  When I was at Hollins I took an education course, just one, and that qualified me to teach in Virginia.  But you know education courses, I think, are incidental.  I think you really have to know something and when I went to the South View School to teach the seventh grade in Roanoke County.  And South View *point over shoulder* is just down the road, it’s down Peter’s Creek Road from here; I was appalled at how docile the children were.  You know this is junior high school and they’re supposed to be questioning and-a disagreeing.

R: If they did then they would be suspended.

            And I thought “These kids are just sitting here believing *hit table* what I’m telling them, /K: laughs/ they are just not raising any issues at all.”  So I was trying to make them more independent. *holds up one finger* I wanted independent thinkers /laughter/ in my class.  Well, I over did it.  /laughter/ they were totally out of control.  What these kids did was, we put on, I was teaching them a little bit of Shakespeare in the 7^th grade if you can imagine, and so we decided to put on a little bit of a Shakespearian play.  The costumes for the last May Day thing that we did at Hollins, this was the year after going to Hollins.  The year I graduated the costumes were Shakespearean costumes because we were doing that period in English History.  So we came over here and I borrowed the costumes *pulls at shirt* and the girls got into these marvelous things with the tall hats with the scarf *pulls on top of imaginary hat* hanging down the back in the style of the Elizabethan clothes and we had some boys just the way Shakespeare did who were really girls in their doublet and hose.  And there we were all dressed for the middle age- for the renaissance and-a they loved it.  Naturally, they had a wonderful time but it was very hard to get them quiet. *waves hand* To get them to do the work, they had to do to know what they were doing.  And we also had another project, the school was brand new and the principle wouldn’t let anybody go out because the grass had not been planted and the school was surrounded by red clay and when it rained it would you know, pull off your shoes or your boots because it was so viscous.  So we were stuck in our classroom all day so I decided we should have a little outdoor education and we would go over to Carven Cove. /laughter/ And so we got this, you know this, was a field day- field trip *makes a circle gesture* so we got a school bus to take us to Carven Cove and I instructed them very carefully before we went under no circumstances were they to get in the boats until I arrived.  Well naturally when I got there they were all in the boats. That kinda thing. That’s the kind of teacher I was. Not very good but I was very popular.  /laughter/

Contribute to your activism

             What contributed was my feeling that things needed to be changed that things weren’t going so well.  Oh I know when I went to Alabama to teach I was teaching philosophy and ethics and I was in the graduate school in Brynmawr *scratches her face* where they expected everybody would work for the P.H.D..  And one day the professor of Aesthetics, he was the head of the department, and he said “you know there are no jobs for women in philosophy and you really should change your field.” and I think he just really wanted to get rid *hand upright* of me cause aesthetics was not my field. I would say political philosophy was my field. And so um, before I could even um, finish the first year of Brynmawr I got a job because down in Alabama they were recruiting for this type of teacher because they wanted the students to begin to think about their religion.  there was tremendous interest in what you might call Evangelical Christianity and they would have mass meetings at lunch time in the gym where they would really get excited and sing *makes a long hand gesture* and carry on.  And the Dean of Women Students felt that these students were just accepting this blindly without *tap table* thinking it through and she wanted somebody to teach philosophy, and ethics.  which I did but my main, goal, in ethics, was, race relations and by the time the kids went home for Christmas they were, I’d really gotten them to fix their heads as far as racial integrations was concerned.  But then, after they came back from Christmas vacation, we had to do it all over again so that did help with (contributing to my work).

Do you consider yourself an activist?

             No, you know it’s a buzz word we’re talking all the time about “activists” when actually if you have a strong belief in the need to change an institution *turns toward Allie* of society such as education, or, well, primarily education in those days.  It was totally dominated by one sex, except the teachers happened to be of the other sex /laugh/ but the decision makers were mostly men.  In 1975 I read that 98 percent, I think somewhere way up in the upper 90s, of the superintendents of schools were male.  So the consumers were half female, the consumers of education, the practitioners of education were mostly women and yet the institution of education was developed by the other sex so you know these were things we had to start thinking about.  And that’s activism if you do anything about it but if you just deplore it, of course, you’re not active.

            I consider myself a change agent. /laugh/   I hope I’m a change agent.  I have been a change agent I’m less active now cause I do everything more slowly.  I seem to be able to think of only one thing at a time instead of keeping five balls in the air at once, which is what you have to do if you are really gonna to get anywhere.

Social change work after you left teaching

             It was all due to Hollins suggesting me for this very activist organization.  At the time it was really commented.  and yesterday I told a story about how we didn’t think of ourselves as women with no power because we had the votes and we didn’t realize we had to really be there *taps table* where the decisions were made to get any real change.   But we could put pressure on the policy makers because we had the votes but we found out, that we weren’t very powerful.  When we went to the War Department, which is now the Pentagon, and I told this story yesterday, when we told them we were interested in the desegregation of the armed forces.  That they should mix up the troops and not have these black units. *moves her right hand away from her body* Because we considered it, in those years, a very poor public policy, injustice.  They told us in effect, without using the same words: to go home and mind our own business.  So that clued us in that we had to have some women *counts on her fingers* in the Defense Department and that they thought that this kind of important public policy was not our business.

            Well, as I explained yesterday, it took the Civil Rights movement, where we learned from our mentor Dorothy Height, that what we had to be concerned about was the institutions of society if we wanted to make change rather than relations between individuals that it that- and what she finally taught us and we finally got it through our heads was that an institution that was developed by one group of people, in this case white males, upper class white males it is not necessarily meeting the needs of the rest of the population and that was a very important thing for us to learn.  So we set about changing institutions.  And that lead us to understand, which we hadn’t before, that the institutions of society had been developed in this country by men, education being the prime example.  So we have to go about getting more women into the decision making part of that institution and that was what sent us into the so called Women’s Movement.

            I, at that time, was at the United Nations representing the World YWCA.  So we had the whole world to work on and because we now have National YWCAs in one hundred and twenty-some countries it is the whole world, almost.  So the idea was to get those affiliates to join the movement. and now, there is, because of the United Nations to hang all these countries’ interests and movements on, you know, you have a structure around which they can coalesce, there is an international women’s movement.  And hopefully and you can see it.  It’s happening, there more women running things than ever before.  /laugh/ The most recent triumph was that the women banded together and got the security council, which is really a male province, to pass a resolution binding governments, because they voted for it, to put women into peace keeping operations, women in peace building programs, and women in disarmament and all those military things that women had been excluded from.  so that’s real progress. We’ll see.  They monitor it every year, the women who put this over are giving the security council a run for it’s money because they get a meeting of the security council going every single year: “how’re you doing? Are you implementing, this resolution?”  It’s known as “holding the feet to the fire.” /laugh/

Do you still feel there’s a movement you’re working with?

             Oh yeah, I’m still working on the same issues because things move so slowly.

It took twenty years working on population issues to get women to be important to fertility rates. /laugh/  In the beginning the decision makers didn’t understand that women really had something to do with the tremendous rise in the population, in the number of people in the world.  We had to teach them that: educated women had fewer children; women who had jobs had fewer children; women who were important in their communities had fewer children because they learned that motherhood was not their only goal in life. (pause)

What made you decide to take part in this project?

            I didn’t know what I was getting into. /laughter/

             My main interest in being here is to be able to hear what you people have to say and I’ve really enjoyed it.  All the time I’ve been here I’ve been able to listen to students because, (pause) you know, generations change and you wanna know what the new thinking is.

I really like to be where students are because this bunch has the most marvelous the people who choose to attended this, symposium I call it, *to Allie* are the ones who are really interested in what’s going on in the world.  And if you don’t take an interest you get things like the Iraq war.  You’ve got to find out now what’s really happening.

Where was your favorite place on campus?

             Where we hung out on campus? Well, our favorite place was across the road.  *point behind shoulder* It was the log cabin, which was then called the Tinker Tea House. Later there were various names but they had sticky buns that you would kill for. And naturally they were not exactly what we should have been eating because most of us gained a few pounds. 

            I wasn’t used to the kind of food that Hollins was serving cause I came from Yankee Land. Were we didn’t have all that good bread, and we didn’t have all those wonderful fried apples with bacon, and we didn’t have all that yummy grits with butter, and then we had a little song about Sunday dinner.  Sunday we had mashed potatoes, broccoli, and chicken and and-a coconut cake or something.  And so that was always Sunday dinner and so we had a little song about it but I’ve forgotten how it goes. So we did love to go over there and stuff ourselves but it was not good. The people who came here were very slim and I gained 15 pounds which was the last 15 pounds I ever gained in my life.

            We also went into town. And as you know in order to go to town we had to get ourselves dressed up in white gloves, usually white, and a hat and stockings and a proper dress, no slacks, and that was to show that we were not to be taken into white slavery.  I think it was supposed to be a protection from anybody who wanted to kind of, lay a hand on us.  I don’t if it did, because some people- I’m sure- got involved with people they shouldn’t have but in general um nobody bothered us.  And-a we would go to a movie, we would go shopping, we would-a call a taxi and the taxi cost a dollar to go to Roanoke but! If you had five people in the taxi it cost everybody obviously, 20 cents. So that’s the way we went.  We didn’t have to put out much money until we got there.

R.P.: That was shortly after I worked in the railroad for 28 cents an hour

            Yeah, yeah he likes to remind me that it’s not the amount of money; it’s the hours of work it takes to buy something. In other words his father had to work many hours to buy him a bicycle.  And if the bicycle cost 50 dollars that was a huge amount of money because he probably had to work, you know, like a week to get that much money to buy him a bicycle, which he did. So that’s his economics.

            Happy Valley was where I got the worst poison ivy I’ve ever had in my life!  It was my birthday, April 28^th 1939, and we were gonna graduate in another month.  And I decided to give myself a birthday party and it was going to be a picnic in Happy Valley.  Happy Valley was across the road and quite a ways down the down a small road, I mean what they called Happy Valley, now it’s whole bunch of houses.  But it was beautiful you could think of it as maybe where Ramona *wide shaking hands* and her lover hung out or some other idyllic place. It had a meadow and beautiful trees and a stream and–a you just couldn’t think of a more poetic setting.  So we spread out our picnic and we all sat down on the ground.  And we had on shorts and we sat in the poison ivy! So my birthday *slap table* party turned out to be very itchy (laugh) but we had a good time until we found out what had happened.  it was all over our legs and behind our knees and on our hands because we had put our hands on the ground.  And I didn’t remember noticing the poison ivy but it was surely there.  But it’s a beautiful place- it was.

Were there any other incidences where you, felt you were going against social convention?

             It was only pointed out to me, weeks later; it never occurred to me that there’d be any question.  She was Japanese. I met her at a conference in Washington and she had a free weekend and I said my roommate’s going to be away come on down and stay. And you know she went to the dining room. We had our meals she slept in my roommate’s bed so what’s the big deal? But some people- because she was a foreigner and also she was not white *finger pointed up* that was the big thing. I mean she looked pretty white but she was an Asian.  She was Japanese.

            Well, later when Logan was president he said “We really want to have some African American,” in those days they used black, “black students at Hollins and we hope you’ll try to recruit some.” the person I knew who would have been perfect, wouldn’t think of going to Hollins because she wanted to be where she might meet some men.  And there are very few African American men around here that she might date.

R.P.: What I was remembering is that you refused to bring her, to suggest it to her because you said you were not ready for her yet.

            Her name was Kate Clark.  And she went to the Master’s School, which is a boarding school near where we live, but she was a day student.  And she was one of their star students.

            Her father was the prominent psychologist on whose testimony the Supreme Court decision for school integration hinged because he had done a great deal of research showing that’s it’s not just separate but equal that will be just, that the fact of being separate is a psychological impediment to education.  And the fact that some people are shut out, of the mainstream if you want to call it that, it’s no longer very main, has a psychological effect on them that makes them feel like second class citizens which prevents them from aspiring to be who they could be.  And that was his testimony which I think swayed the Supreme Court. 

            So she was a very desirable prospect she was very bright she had a wonderful academic record and I really did not want her, whom I knew, to be subject to any *tap fingers in cage* kind of, you know how it might have been.  It didn’t seem fair. 

            So what they did was, they were able to get some students from places like Jamaica, where they knew that they were important and they knew they were equal cause they came from an all black society more or less, even though the British were dominate.  They spoke excellent English and it did help them fit in better that in those years.  But you know what happened? The people in the dining room, and this was later when they had the cafeteria system, I mean, people at counters to serve you not tables with white table clothes the way we were served. We were treated like plantation owners.  

            That’s a bad simile because of what Hilary Clinton did.  You know she said the Bush administration is a plantation.  And by that she meant that some people are the bosses but then the press built that up into a kind of a racial slur which she did not deserve, she didn’t mean that at all.  But anyway, she shouldn’t have been so smart and used such a clever simile.

            But they refused to serve these Jamaicans and Barbadians or whoever they had, people from the West Indies, they thought it was not proper for them to be here at Hollins.

R.P.: It was the black waiters -who refused to serve them

            These women who were serving *shake hand* at the counters where people would pick up their meals.  So it cuts both ways and that they had to deal with, also, at college.  This is my memory of it, you know I could be wrong about the way it happened, but that’s what I was told, I wasn’t actually here.

            Well, you have to have a piece of paper. (Laugh)  One thing I want to say about this business of documentation.  You know Hollins Columns was previously called the Echo or some dumb name like that, and if you look I’m sure the files of the Hollins Columns and its predecessors are here.  And if you look in any year you’ll find what the big issue was and at one point I’m sure you’ll find this thing about the people refusing to serve the students, if you need that kind of documentation. (Laugh) It’s a lot of work.

            We had two factions among students I happened to be the chairman of what was called the student curriculum committee, I think *raise finger circle hand* that’s what its name was.  We were supposed to advise the administration on what students wanted in terms of curriculum.  But students were totally divided.  Half of them, I don’t know if it was exactly half, but roughly the ones who thought about it, wanted a straight liberal arts curriculum.  The others wanted more technical subjects that would get them jobs.  and my personal opinion was that this was not a technical school it was a liberal arts school and that’s where we should put our emphasis but I was chairing and I couldn’t try, I would maybe try to influence them a little, but I wouldn’t overtly do it. And-a we did come out with a scheme where the liberal arts would be the primary courses taught but in order to facilitate that work we’d have things like typing, now it would be computers, and some other technical thing.  the way of getting it in there was that it would be a technical support for the academic work and that’s what we recommended and they did do that.  You wouldn’t get credit.  If you took typing you wouldn’t get credit for it, it would only be to facilitate your work.  In other words we wanted them to teach what they now call keyboard so that we could all learn to type and the teachers thought that was a great idea because then they could all read our papers.

International Relations Club

            When I was in high school I took a course in European History that was marvelous. I was in Salem High School and our teacher was a really talented student of European history and a good teacher.  And you know I was so crazy about it that I learned as much as possible about the history of Europe.  In 1935, ‘6, and ‘7, and it was 1936 and ‘7 that I was doing the International Relations Club, Europe was about to explode. And so we were very interested and we actually as I remember we didn’t just inform ourselves but I think we would have a forum or a briefing or something to try to get people to come and be informed on some of these questions.  but then we took a peace position and our main professor here who was interested in Europe, was the professor of political science and, as I said yesterday, he said that Europe was going to go to war and we didn’t like that idea.  Cause we were peaceniks! So we called him a war monger we were very unhappy with him, but of course he was right (clears throat) I think that was our main thing we did and, let’s see that was ‘35, we might have studied the League of Nations.  The US was not a member of the League of Nations we didn’t have direct-

R.P.: Well nobody was for very long

            It went out of business in the World War.  I mean it failed! (Laugh) They had a war. Anyway, I think we did study the League of Nations and what it was doing and not doing.  But it was kind of like the League of Women Voters: we studied.

How you met your husband

            Right in Salem, on our front yard!  We had moved here very recently when I was a junior- in the fall- and he came up with a friend.

R.P.: You had been moving back and forth before.

            But when actually set up housekeeping in the house we had used in the summer before.  You know, we came down here in the summer.  It’s a very small house and-a my father built some more rooms onto it when we actually moved but it still wasn’t very big. He had built it for his father and he’d also built a little.  

            His father, who was a farmer at heart but who was really a horsy man he bought trotters *wide arms* into the country and he had had a big farm and a trotting ring on his farm.  Every Fourth of July he would have trails with these horses and people would bring their horses and their silkies and they would race *circle hand* and carry on and he managed to bankrupt himself.  Finally he’d borrowed so much money to invest in these horses his farm was to be sold for taxes and my grandmother had a little money and so she bought the farm back when the government was going to auction it off.  She bid it back and-a so then she owned the farm. (Laugh)  And she was tired of his shenanigans and so she threw him out.  So my father took pity on him and built (this house).  He bought some property in Salem with a beautiful view, which was his main consideration, and he built him a little house and he built himself a stable for the one horse that he kept.  The horse was the champion his name was Champion I used to know it. It was a Scotch name.  Anyway, he brought the horse and my mother said funniest thing she ever saw was to go up and visit my grandfather at his little place, four acres, and watch him try to plow with a race horse. (R.P.: laugh) He would say “whoa, whoa” and be cussing and running behind the plow (laugh) trying to get this very poor land plowed so he could raise his vegetables.  He loved to raise produce.  He loved to raise flowers and wonderful looking vegetables.  It was his pride because he really, at heart, even though he was at one time a huge land owner and a very important person on the eastern shore of Maryland he descended to four acres but he still wanted to farm.

M: You might say I’m a raconteur. (Laugh)

            He came up to play badminton on the grass.

R.P.: Bill brought me up to introduce me to you.

             Well that! I didn’t know that.  It was a hidden agenda.  So he brought his badminton racket and they were playing badminton and I had been in Roanoke I had a job in the college shop at Hieronymus. Which was then the Department store, Miller and Rhodes wasn’t here and all the big stores weren’t here, Hieronymus was the main store.  And they employed people in college every summer to try and sell their clothes *circle left hand* to these students who, in those days, bought really good clothes to go to school, not just jeans.  And-a so I was working and I had arrived home and he was there so we met and-a we got to talking and we sat in the car, for a long time, it got dark and then the mosquitoes began to bite.  Do you remember the mosquitoes?

R.P.: That was another night.

            Well, anyway we just hit it off fine.  And he was hard to get.  I had to really really really work hard on him.

R.P.: It was because I had determined years before I was never gonna marry.

            Yeah, he told me he was never going to marry.  I didn’t know why but I don’t think he was uh gay but he said he wasn’t going to get married.  So I said famous last words- to myself *hand on heart* so I worked him over for four and a half years. (Laughs)  When he started writing me everyday I knew I had him hooked. (Laugh) I was down in Alabama, and he was at the University of Virginia so it was quite a distance and we had to write letters.

R.P.: Wait a minute, all the time I was at the University of Virginia you were here.  We graduated the same year.

            That’s right, that’s right, you were in New York.  That’s even further away.  He got a job in a New York law firm and I was in Alabama.  (Pause)

Your daughter’s death

            Oh (sigh) she was wonderful.  Her main concern was the trouble was the trouble she was giving other people. Because when she became disabled, from the multiple sclerosis, *extend arm* she (pause) had to be taken care of and her husband finally got to be her main caretaker.  He actually gave up his job when their son went to college.  He gave up his job cause the son, they lived very close to the high school, and he used to home everyday at lunch and give her her lunch and then her son would come home in the afternoon. (Quietly) And when he went away to college Charles, *circle left hand* her husband, resigned from his professorship and took care of her, and they finally moved to a beautiful house in New Hampshire.  And he was her exclusive caretaker except for a nurses’ aid who came in to give her a bath *circle left hand* and all that.  but she would panic if he got out of her sight cause every now and then he would have to do something and we would stay with her and it was very clear that she was very anxious all the time he was away.  And finally she had trouble breathing *right hand on heart and left on table* and-a trouble swallowing because your nerves control everything and the nerves gradually didn’t work.  So she died.  We weren’t there, he *says to Dick* left a message on our answering machine and I called him back.  The position that I took, and I’m sure he did, was that she had to go sometime because we knew that life, was just a burden for her and so we couldn’t be too sad for her but you know (quietly) it was a big loss. (Louder) Because she’d been so active and so busy so—so talented you know, she was offered a job at Bowling Green, part of the Ohio University System, teaching physics and she wouldn’t do it said it was more fun to work in the lab with Charles.

R.P.: She had a desk beside his.

            In the lab.  She was free labor for the astronomy and physics department.  (Quiet) Anyway that was what happened and naturally it was it was a horrible loss.  It had been coming on for fifteen years and when something like that happens and you know the person is better off it’s not the same shock like an automobile accident.  So we set up a little foundation for her at Hollins and I’m still trying to get around to writing the thing.   It’s in memory of her mother-in-law, her physics teacher, and her.  And I’m still getting around to writing the thing I wanna write about the two of them so I hope I do it soon.

Any compromises you may have had to make between your family life and your social work

            Ah yes, that’s the classic question. (Pause) Well, (pause) I did one terrible thing.  I was invited to a conference in Europe.  I think that was the time.  My two boys had just gotten over measles and you know measles is a serious disease, childhood disease.  And Dick’s sister was living with us at that time but she refused to baby-sit them after they got out of school, they were school age.  And I wanted to go and so I put them in camp, in a day camp where they had a little bus to take them to camp everyday.  And apparently it wasn’t a very well organized camp it was at the Hackly School which was a good boarding school.  Near by in Tarrytown and apparently they were supposed to play baseball a lot and they were standing out in the sun.  You know, they weren’t good so they were put in the outfield, and you know all that standing around in baseball.  And I felt really guilty that they could’ve been you know, really damaged having just gotten over measles with this kind of treatment and maybe it was fairly rigorous or some of the other exercises they did, I don’t know, but I always felt bad about that, but I did it. 

            How abused did you feel when I went away? *to Dick*

R.P.: I never gave it much thought because that’s what you did.

            Well, he was very busy.  He had to work a lot at night, seven days a week.  And if he didn’t come home at night, I could get my work done.  My work for the various things I was involved with and so it had its upside. 

            The most awful part was trying to find *tap table* a babysitter when there was an appointment you absolutely had to keep.  And that was really hard and you would kinda go crazy with that, and most women still do, even though they have jobs they still do things at night.  And if they don’t have somebody at home to look after the kids you have to find some reliable and that’s also a problem and it was then too. I know our granddaughter-in-law goes to college and she has four little children so she has a babysitter. 

Children

            They were, one was born in ‘52, one in ‘48 and the other in ‘45 so, they were not too far apart.  They went the girl and two boys.  And-a by the time they were all in high school and college I felt, my life had begun.  I was working all along on these projects but I think from the age of forty to maybe 75 *trace line on table*, if you’re female, are the very best years of your life and you can accomplish more because you’re major responsibilities have slackened a bit.  You can just really devote yourself to whatever career you’re in.  At least that was my experience, doesn’t happen to everybody.  Oh, there’s no question.  You’re at the high of your powers I think if you don’t get sick.

Grandchildren

            Our son Phillip has no children because his wife apparently, either didn’t want children or couldn’t have children and we’ve never asked, naturally, but they just didn’t have children.  And our son Richard had two and Louise had two, so four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.  Four great-grandchildren from the same grandson and then, he left her or he threw her out.  He was not a nice little boy we think he isn’t even related to us.  I mean really, he’s so different.

            Well, if I’d been- if I were in a developing country I’d be embarrassed, to have so few children.  My job would be to have children.

            See in those days, this was right after World War Two remember?  The baby boom and the “classic family” was: two boys and two girls.  And we assumed we’d have four children but then I got so busy I forgot about it.  In between the two boys there’s four years difference between the two of them and anther one was supposed to be slotted in there but I forgot about it. (Laughs) I didn’t get around to thinking about it until three years later.  So that’s the way we had three instead of four but every ad you saw had these two boys and two girls and the happy family.  Really recovering from the war, beginning to spend money, it was a great time.  The fathers had gone on the G.I. Bill and gotten their education and were really doing well it was really, okay.

Civil Rights Act

            Well the main thing is enforcement and it’s been pretty well enforced.  Except in places like Florida, where we know from the 2000 election that there was a deliberate effort to keep African Americans and Hispanics from voting by various devices.  We know that there was a deliberate effort in other states too, but Florida’s the one that got the publicity.  First of all the machines in the areas where they live, the voting machines, were not cleaned out, you know they had those punch machines.  Where you have to punch the paper and the paper goes into the machine and if they don’t clean out the machines then the, you remember the dimples?  Well the punch does not go all they way through and make a hole.  You just get a dimple.

R.P.: It makes a hole but it’s still hanging there.

            Or you just get nothing because they’re so clogged up with paper that the punch won’t go through at all.  So they cleaned out the machines in the more or less white districts but in the Hispanic districts and the black districts they didn’t bother they didn’t get around to it.  It wasn’t important.  And it’s the price of housing segregation.  And so when they started counting, those votes were not correct and that was just typical of one of the devices that they used.  They would move the polling place and they wouldn’t notify the people, they would lose their addresses, they would claim that they were felonies, if you had the slightest infraction your name would be on the list of felonies and you wouldn’t be allowed to vote it went on and on and on.  So we’ve got the law but the law has to be enforced.

            I think we have to get a different administration who will pay attention to these things.  a lot of people who voted in the last election voted against their own interests because the question of poverty is totally ignored by the people they voted for.  they didn’t care about poverty, they didn’t care about enforcing the civil rights laws, they didn’t care about the environment, *wave hand* and these are the people who are the most effected by those issues: people who are forced to live in districts that are polluted either by chemicals or the air from congested traffic and factories and mills.  You know, it’s in their interest to vote for people who want to clean up the environment.  So I feel bad about it.  That’s how I feel. (Laugh)

            And the next question could be ‘what area you doing about it?’  Well, we’re not in a position to do very much because we’ve been manipulated so that it’s very hard to change the people in power because their districts have been gerrymandered so that they’re going to be automatically reelected.  The ones who are in there now, etcetera.

President’s Commission on the U. N.

            Well, now you’ve got a real story.  There were two commissions I happened to be on one was appointed by Nixon and the other by Carter.  and the one appointed by Nix-

R.P.: How about (pause) Kennedy?

             Oh Kennedy, well he-

R.P.: You were there and reported to him.

             Yeah, but that was a different scene. Kennedy appointed the first of the Women’s Commission to Study Women and Eleanor Roosevelt chaired it and I was not on the actual commission but I was what was known as a “public member.”  They the commission appointed a lot of committees to advise it on different topics and I was put on the committee on social security and taxation if you can imagine and since I didn’t feel the least bit competent in that field even though I’d been working on it a lot.  I had a marvelous partner she’s the one that really wrote the paper and her name was Evelyn Burns and she taught, I think, at Queen’s College and she was an expert on both those issues.  I knew enough about it to understand the need for changing some of the laws.  One was changing social security laws so that a wife who survives her husband would get enough money to live on.  Because originally the husband dies and the wife gets half of what they were getting together but that, meant that, she had to live on half of what it took both of them to live and as you know two can live cheaper than one so it was that kinda thing.  So we tried to remedy that and-a other little quirks which were disadvantageous to women we worked on those.  At least some of those laws were changed.  And now the men are screaming that the women get an undue advantage so you know.

            That one Eleanor Roosevelt died in the middle of it which was very sad. So when we went to report to Kennedy, who had appointed the commission, Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t alive but it had been taken over by the senator, Maureen Neuberger, wherever she was from.  And-a she had chaired it and we were there in the White House presenting this commission to the President.  You know we got it all done up in a nice binding and presented it to him and it was a big sad occasion because Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t there.         The saddest *swing arm* occasion was when I had to report (pause) hey, maybe that was the time, that we had to report on a commission that was scheduled to report and Kennedy had already died.

R.P.: I was thinking of the time where he listened to you for a couple of hours and then he went out into the Rose Garden.

            That was in commission on civil rights just before he died 1963, he was assassinated in November, and we reported in the middle of the summer.  I mean we were meeting with him, he had a called us.  He was desperately trying to get enough support in congress to pass this new law.  And it was the First Civil Rights Act *tap table and shake head* and he would call down the lawyers, he would call down the ministers, a whole bunch of different people, mostly men, with whom he met in the East Room of the White House to try to get them on board. And Ester Peterson, who was my friend and his advisor, she said to him, “If you want action you’ve gotta call the women.”  So! He invited my whole public affairs committee, which numbered 75 people, we wanted enough committee members in each state to you know, try to put things over. So he invited all 75 members of my committee, the Public Affairs Committee of the National Board of the Y and she only invited, or he did well, we got the telegram signed by him*slap table* but she made up the list and she only invited the President and the Chief Executive of the other women’s organizations. I said “Ester! Why did you embarrass me so!” She said “I had to have somebody who would get the job done.” So I was very pleased because everybody went home and they all set up some program or strategy to get this vote in all these different states, so I think we contributed.

            The Nixon commission was something else again.  It was mostly big name people that were appointed or artists.  It was to study the United Nations. And I made them study the U.S. government’s input to the United Nations.  They really weren’t prepared to do that but I got them to do it.  There were two senators and two congressmen, congresspersons, I don’t think we had any women congress people on the commission, we might’ve and a lot of donors to the Republican campaign.  And what did they know, you know?  They really enjoyed the prestige of being on the commission; they didn’t really do any work.  The work had to be done by people who knew something about the United Nations and that was very few.  So I had to work pretty hard.  I had to write part of the report and so on. 

            I just did it you know, I didn’t have to because we had a staff member who wrote a draft, but then he asked me to write the one on human rights and on some other topic. 

            Why was I appointed on a Nixon commission?  I mean, I wondered myself but what happened was that the Ambassador to the U.N. who was Charles Yost, a marvelous man, he was part of the discussions as to who would be on this commission and he said “we have to have a non-governmental person on this commission because they are the main influence on the United Nations.” *taps table* I happened to be chairing an organization called the Conference of United Nations Representatives and I was the logical person since I chaired this group of NGOs.  So he had to go to bat for me cause I didn’t have any political credentials or wasn’t a big campaign donor or anything.  and so he insisted that I was his one choice.  The Ambassador to the U.N., this is what somebody who was there told me, he said that he was the Ambassador to the U.N. so the Ambassador should have one choice at least as to who should be on this committee, the Commission to Study the U.N., so I was his choice.  I couldn’t say: I don’t want to serve under President Nixon when he had gone to bat for me you know, it was a rock and a hard place type of issue.  but of course I did it because I wasn’t going to embarrass him.

            So I did do it and it was quite a struggle.  Because it turned out our agenda was to get China seated in the U.N. that was what Nixon wanted, and Nixon in foreign policy was pretty good.  He said he wasn’t a crook but he might have been but he was a good foreign policy president except for disarmament.  So we had to struggle in the commission because some people really didn’t want this and we finally got to where we were about to vote. *two taps on table*   And most of us were prepared to vote for China and a woman from the State Department, who was on the commission, did some funny, *curls hand* parliamentary, trick and the vote turned out to be a vote for China and Taiwan; that there should be two Chinas and that was an absolute no-no.  

            And of course China wouldn’t go in into the U.N. if Taiwan was also in there, so the U.S. just pulled the rug out from Taiwan. which they’d been protecting and nurturing and promised to defend, all those years. They just went zip *pulling motion* and the rug disappeared and they were out.  It was a terrible shock for them and really not quite fair but it happened.  China came and brought gifts, one of their gifts to the United Nations was an absolutely humongous tapestry. *both arms wide* There was only one wall in the whole U.N. that was big enough for it.  It was a tapestry of the Great Wall and when they presented it the neon colors would knock you over.  But now it has faded after fifty years, so that it looks really good it doesn’t strike you as being a cartoon.  It’s a very pretty tapestry of the Great Wall.  So anyway, China was seated and Taiwan was left out in the cold but with a big treaty that they would still be defended. 

            One of the little girls that I’ve been, well not little girls, one of the young interns *tap table* I’ve been working with this past week is from Taiwan.  We talked about politics she said that they were just doing best they could, a middle course so they didn’t get gobbled up, so that they have a little bit of autonomy.  So that was Nixon.

            He gave a gorgeous dinner for us and invited Buton(?) who was then the Secretary General of the U.N. and the senators and different people made speeches including Shirley Temple. 

            Actually it was very funny, when I went into the White House to go to that dinner the young marine at the door, who was there to let us in, said to me: “Are you Shirley Temple?”  I said “No, no, no, I’ve got ten years on her, but she has ten pounds on me.”  Which was kinda mean.

            Well when she was ambassador to Ghana and she did so well I really was thrilled.  Nixon had appointed another actress who was just- a non-entity as far as making a contribution was concerned.  But Shirley Temple Black really worked on her assignment and she did a good job at the U.N. and a good job in Ghana. So I was very happy to be, confused with her.

            The next one was Carter. And that was the fun one because we were charged with putting on this big convention.  It was called the National Commission on Women’s Year.  This was the U.S. commission not the international one.  We had this humongous convention in Huston and prior to that, this all happened in one year or less, prior to that we had to put on fifty state meetings to which every woman who wanted to come was invited.  And six territory meetings because there were places like Guam that was a U.S. territory and those women had to vote too.  Every state had to vote to elect delegates to this big meeting. *points across table* I attended quite a few of them. 

            One of them was where I was called a communist by a newspaper in Louisiana because I quoted somebody else.  It wasn’t something I had to say I was quoting Bella Abzug and the newspaper got word of what had been said and decided it was a communist statement so somebody sent me a clipping about how I was a communist.  I’m sure that didn’t sit very well with the President’s Commission, I mean the people in Washington, if they had known about it, which they probably didn’t. 

            So this commission had a big job to do and of course it was the year when women were finally getting a little bit of recognition and we were able to get women who wanted to work on this commission to put on this conference from various departments of government they would ask to be seconded *light tap on table* to the commissions staff and they worked like beavers.  They did this immense amount of work, you cannot believe how much work it was, for a relatively small staff to put on all these meetings in one year or less because the big meeting was in November and the smaller state meetings were all though the spring and summer.  And they had to work like dogs to get it all done. 

            And I’m still in touch with some of them and they have wonderful and important jobs, now.  They were marvelous they put up with Bella.  Bella was a bulldozer. *slap table*  She was the congress person, a congresswoman, from New York she had managed to get the 5 million dollars out of the congress to put on this meeting when they really didn’t want to do it, but she persuaded them. And she was, as a result of having raised the money, she managed to be appointed to Chair the commission.  Well, she got things done.  They way she did it was just practically by knocking people in the head.  She was so rude and so demanding that people would cry because she was so abusive you know, if it didn’t go her way!  I found out that she was the kind of bully you had to stand up to and she would back down.  She went after me once and I said, “Bella, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” and I explained to her how it really happened.  But I just had to say, “Bella you don’t know what you’re talking about” to get her to listen.  We did survive her, we got the meeting done and it was quite a success, a wonderful success.  People like Gloria Stein were wonderful politicians and very sensitive to different people’s agendas and she would work all night with different groups to get them to agree so that we could have consensus as to what we wanted to recommend.

            Well, it was very exciting and Betty Freidan had been holding out against gays.  We had a plank in our agenda, we called it the National Women’s Agenda, that was the recommendation for ways the laws should be changed and other things.  And Betty Freidan didn’t want anything about gays, but there was a great big gay-lesbian caucus at meeting and they, naturally, wanted recognition, and they wanted justice and to be treated like anybody else.  And most of the people were very sympathetic to that so they went to work on Betty Freidan and she finally stood up in the meeting and said she had changed her mind.  That now she understood.  Which was a great triumph for the gay rights people who were trying very hard to get a good recommendation in this agenda and they did.  I feel that justice for gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexuals… I think that was the cutting edge of social change in those days and still is.  I mean justice for all these people, is the cutting edge of what needs to be done.  Aside form poverty and all the big issues this is the social issue that needs to be taken care of and it still isn’t.  We got through that and we recommended a lot of other things which have since become law.

            Aside from the main meetings we had what they called “side events” and I was elected the Head of the International *fingers upright and then tap together* Committee so I was responsible for the international component of this International Women’s Year Meeting and I was able to bring, with the cooperation of my friends in the State Department, I was able to bring about 70 or 80 women form various countries to observe this conference.  You can imagine what some of those Latin American women, who had never had a chance to talk about the kind of issues we were exploring, like abortion and marriage and all those cutting edge issues to hear them openly addressed on the floor of a huge convention blew their minds, they were so amazed. But it also opened their minds because most of them were under great restrictions.  They couldn’t go out without their husbands.  They could never make an appointment with a lawyer, if they wanted a divorce.  How could they possibly be in touch with a lawyer?  Because you just didn’t do that, in some of those countries.  So it was great for them and we had people from the Middle East and all over the world there and we put on all kinds of panels. 

            I had Margaret Mead talking.  Margaret Mead was very ill and her staff told me she was not allowed to have an interview with an individual reporter but she could have a press conference.  So I had to kinda wait till she felt up to it cause she was really quite ill, this was shortly before she died.  And I thought, “How will I get the press, if I only announce it an hour ahead how will I get the press to come?” *two fingers up*  So I put up a little notice in the press room that said “Margaret Mead will do a briefing at 2 o’clock.”  The place was packed.  They had one hour to find out about it, and she was marvelous, of course.

            And-a so we had her.  And she was part of a panel and I remember one thing she said in that panel.  She talked about the YWCA in Africa, and there were a couple of people who kinda snickered, you know, those little old ladies in tennis shoes.  And she said “Don’t laugh! *stares sternly* The YWCA has done more for the women of Africa than any other organization!”  She said it right there, so she knew.  Anyway, I was very pleased about that. 

            We put on a marvelous meeting where we brought experts from various parts of the world on disarmament.  We had Helen Callicott.  Do you know who she is?  She’s a pediatrician who has spent her life talking about disbarment.  First of all, she’s the one who really got the who got nuclear testing in the atmosphere abolished because she pointed out what it was doing to the children, to breathe strontium 90, which was the element that was being released by these tests in the air.  And she showed how the strontium 90 was found not only in milk but in mother’s milk and that everybody was breathing it and it was very damaging.  It was Kennedy who got this through the congress.  No more testing in the air.  When the United Stated stopped testing France was still doing it and polluting the South Pacific, but they gradually had to stop too.  And we had other experts in disarmaments.  It was a wonderful meeting. 

            It was going to be held at 12 o’clock because the commission was going to recess on that day at 12 o’clock.  Bella called a special meeting of the convention delegates so a lot of them had to leave our meeting and miss it.  Which was too bad but we still had interesting people there who weren’t delegates, among the 20 thousand who came.

            We put on other events, international events, we had the Secretary Attorney General of the U.N., who had been the head of the International Women’s Year Government Conference, come and make a little talk.  We had Margaret Mead as I’ve mentioned and we had Barbra Jordan she was marvelous. She was a senator from Texas.   She died very early but she was a very powerful woman. And somebody said on the radio recently she “spoke with moral *slap table* authority” *slap table* and she did. You know, if it wasn’t right you don’t do it.

Most memorable thing about the women’s year conventions

             Oh this is very hard to say because there were a huge number of memorable moments.  I think the most memorable thing that happened in Mexico, to me.  We had worked very hard to get people whom the governments didn’t want there, to come to our meeting because it was a non-governmental meeting and we could invite who we wanted to.  And we invited everybody who wanted to come who could get there. 

            One person we wanted was a little woman this high *hold hand up about 3 feet* from Bolivia. She was the wife of a tin miner. And she had started a project among the women to bake a special kind of biscuit that is very popular in Latin America and sell them. And they were making money for the first time.  She had organized them to do this.  And for the first time they were able to send their children to school because you have to buy school uniforms and other supplies for school and most of those campesinas didn’t have the money, even though their most of their husbands were working the tin mine and making money.  And so we had heard about her and what she had done, in her really remote mountain village, because there was a social worker from Catholic Charities who had worked with them and told us about her.  Her name was Donatela de Sernaga and so we invited her.  The Bolivian government said, “No way is she gonna go.”  Cause she was something of a revolutionary.  And the tin miners were kinda out of control they were needed, the government had to have them, because one of their main exports was tin so that gave *shakes hand* them a certain independence.  So they said no she wasn’t gonna go.  Wouldn’t gonna give her an exit visa so, the tin miners when they heard this the union, they were unionized, they said okay the wives, and can you image for a woman they would do this?  The wives of the government officials are gonna go, and highly placed women are gonna go, and if you don’t let this woman go we’re gonna strike. We got a telegram *lifts right hand* telling us this.  So we didn’t know whether she was gonna get there or not.

            She was three days late. I was standing in the hall, corridor *opens hand* very noisy place, cause everybody was buzzing and talking.  Even when the meetings were going on there were plenty of people out in the corridor and this social worker had brought her, to see that she got to the meeting.  She came up to me with this woman. And we both cried *tears up* cause it was so hard for her to get there. She’d been through so much. So then when she tried to go home they wouldn’t let her back in.  And so she had to walk over the mountains into Bolivia by an indirect route in order to get home.  She had 8 children she said they needed her.  She had to go home (this way) even though we, somebody in our group or one of the governments, wrote to the Bolivian government saying: she needs to go home to her eight children but they still wouldn’t give her a visa to get back in.  But this was I think the most memorable story.

            It was really great. She turned out to be quite a revolutionary.  she came to the meeting in Denmark she lead a march.  She was a fiery speaker.  The minute she came to us in Mexico within 5 minutes *tapping table* she was on the floor in the big meeting and she was ranting and raving, about the injustices that were done to the peasants in Bolivia and everybody was only allowed to speak 5 minutes then you were supposed to have a discussion from the whole audience.  She spoke the five minutes and the chairman started to pound her down and then there was such a roar from the audience.  She was speaking in Spanish and I was listening from the door.  I didn’t have earphones to translate, my Spanish isn’t that good, I wasn’t getting exactly what she was saying but I could tell by the tone of voice and also the rest of the folks who were listening to her insisted *pound table* she had to go on.  The person in the chair had enough sense to let her go on or we would have a riot.  She was fiery.  

            She went to Denmark and she lead *spreads arms wide* a march for whatever you know, poverty or social justice or whatever.  At least in Bolivia they vote. Then a bunch of communists in Denmark took her on a tour of places they thought she should speak and kept her there.  I don’t know what problems she had getting back at that time because I wasn’t responsible and I didn’t feel I had to see that she got home.  I don’t know what’s happened to her.  Maybe she’s the loyal opposition in Bolivia now, if she’s still alive.

International Women’s tribune center

            That was a very exciting time because we had to do something we were getting so many communications.  After the Mexican meeting these women desperately needed something to hang on to.  We had thousands of people on our mailing list. 

            So, as I said yesterday, we raised some money, the Canadians actually offered it to us.  They offered us 50,000 dollars and they wanted me to take a salary.  I said, “No way, we can’t afford it.” Dick, of course, is the one who ultimately helped subsidize our organization.  We went out and got more money because we had something going and the foundations would support us and some of the governments.  The Dutch, the Swedes, and the Norwegians were very generous.  We got a really great center going.  We had training sessions in communication for women from different countries so they could spread *circles hand* the word.  We paid their expenses to come to New York and stay in New York a couple weeks to learn how to do it.  How to get a newsletter out, how to use *hand waves back and forth* the radio, how to use other communication methods to let people know what was going on with women all over the world.  They would write to us, or call us, or send us reports on what they were doing.  We’d put that in our newsletter in other words we were able to bring the women *moves hands together* together from all over the world around this central structure which was the United Nations.  And then, I think, we were instrumental in helping get those other conferences.  The three other conferences but the Tribune is what we’re talking about.  It meant that I went there everyday because they needed as much help as we could provide: volunteers and otherwise.  My colleague Rosen Harris who was head of the conference of NGOs that really put on these meetings, I mean they were the official sponsor of all these woman’s meetings, and others too.  She wasn’t with us in the beginning, she was head of another organization that demanded her attention, but later she came and worked with us the way I was doing.  She was amazed at how much progress we had made while she was not there and I felt good about that because she really wanted it to happen.  And I just think we were the thing that kept *two hands in a circle, point up with one hand* the movement going at a time when it might have foundered, had it not a communication medium.  'Cause the U.N., as I said yesterday, they didn’t get out a newsletter about this conference and about what was happening, to follow it up and implement the decisions that were made, for two years! And we had ours out within a couple months.  Well, we had our first newsletter out within about five months, at least, when the conference closed and that kept *large circle with one hand* the momentum going.  Kept the people involved.  Kept us in touch with the leaders in these various countries.  

            You know, people who were mentioned yesterday by the other panelist were people I knew.  They were the leaders in various fields and they all coalesced *moves hands together* around this international movement and it was quite a phenomenon.  And certainly, the most successful program the U.N. has ever mounted and it wasn’t because the delegates really wanted it. /chuckles/ They just got tricked into it! /laugh/

            The thing that, I think, we contributed to the conferences was having really good attendance and enthusiasm about the next conferences.  Beijing *tap table* that attracted 30,000 women who had to pay their way to get there and conditions were very bad.  It rained, everything was muddy, communications equipment broke down, or it didn’t work.

R.P.: We recommended that people take a tent and hip boots.

             They invited me to come, I didn’t go.  They invited me to come and address the opening of the forum, the parallel forum and it was going to be held in a huge stadium and I said “thanks, but no thanks.”  They offered me to get me seated, I had a hotel room, which was hard to get, and all that, but I just felt I was a has been and they didn’t need to hear form me.  And further more, all the same things that had always been happening were happening, and the new people would be the ones to make the contributions.  The people with new ideas and I didn’t feel I was needed. I only go where I’m needed. 

            So I didn’t go to Beijing but I did help plan the meeting.  It had a lot of snags *hand slaps table* but we had it.  and it turned out to be the most publicized one because, naturally, the press only covers conflict and there was a huge conflict between the NGOs *tap table* and the government of China *tap table* because the Chinese decided they couldn’t risk having all those NGOs in Beijing where the political conference was held.  That they would just get too much in the way, so they told us we had to have our meeting out at Waro (?) which was about twenty miles away.  With the traffic and the narrow roads it took about an hour, each way, to get from one place to another.  Naturally, the NGOs wanted to be where the conference was so they could lobby the conference.  Anyway, the NGOs the ones who were running things wasted a huge amount of time and money trying to get the Chinese to change their minds.  And they got so behind in registering people and making all the arrangement a lot of it wasn’t done which was very sad. But it was because of this big argument.  You can’t get the Chinese government *taps twice* to change its mind once it’s made a decision!  What’d they think?

            Anyway, the press did cover this big argument between the government and the NGOs and that got them started covering the conference, so it got a lot more coverage than the others.  We tried to keep Mexico secret because the Mexican government was so paranoid about having too many North Americans that we didn’t want to let people in this country know that they could go.  Enough of them found out to scare the Mexicans but we didn’t give out any publicity at all.  Some people say to me “I never heard of it” and I say “That was our intention.”  We publicized it in other countries because we wanted them.

Leaving the Woman’s Tribune Center

            Oh well, it’s just that I was very strict about the legal arrangements under which we operated.  And when I found out that the staff didn’t, as much as I had tried to get it into their heads, they didn’t really believe that they had to do it and I felt that if they were going to do anything that really was illegal, which probably never would have made one bit of difference, but I really couldn’t be party to it.  But that was the time that they cried so much that I changed my mind.  But then at the end, when I decided it was time to go was when one of the board members, she wanted to employ an independent consultant to look over *circles right hand and taps table* our arrangements, well interview all the staff and all the board and make recommendations.  It cost a lot of money that we didn’t have, that we should have been putting into program.  When he came back and recommended that we have a CEO and the CEO be given all the power to hire and fire and make program decisions.  And the board would have very little power except to raise money.  I just decided that I didn’t want to be in that kind of organization and that’s when I told them that they were getting along fine without me.  The director cried a lot but the others understood my point.

            I might’ve made some changes in the staff or something like that if I could’ve changed anything about my time there.

            The rest of them were marvelous they put up with all kinds of conditions.  They put up with, every now and then we’d run outta money and they couldn’t get paid till we got in new funds, and they put up with that and they did everything to keep the thing going. At great personal sacrifice in some cases because everybody was so committed to this success and it really was successful.

            It still exists.  Now, instead of doing the kind of work we were doing before, they’re doing a great deal of email.  They have a huge mailing list and they have a newsletter that comes out about every week or two and they report on what’s happening in the South Pacific, what’s happening in South Africa, about women.  They are huge reports, great detail and people all over the world receive this.  People have computers now and if each individual doesn’t have a computer than the office *circles right hand* of the organization does and so it’s really the same thing, only done in a much more efficient way.  It’s not as personal and interesting as those great little newsletters we used to put out with the wonderful graphics. 

            This person I was talking about who’s such a talented graphic artist, she could tell a story with a few little funny stick *twist hand* characters that you would have to write up for a full page.  She was just so good.  And what a good photographer!  She made slide shows and videos of course, I never did keep any of them.  I know I gave some of them to the YWCA and goodness knows what’s happened to them, but these were really great reports on the various conferences with pictures and dialogue, etcetera.

How do you feel about the YWCA?

            I think they have deliberately changed from a movement, as I said yesterday, to a social service organization. They do have two important priorities. The first one is the elimination of racism.  Which they’re not working on it the way we used to: we did everyday in everyway.  They have something called “Hallmark Programs” *taps table* where each YWCA’s is committed to putting on some special program designed to eliminate racism in their area. And they also have a huge amount of childcare, which is great. Cause their values are the same and they’re trying to instill in these children under their care, the values *wide arms* of openness, integration, acceptance of all kinds of people, and so on.  Of course the childcare centers themselves have all kinds of people, and races, and economic levels because they subsidize some and others pay full fare.  So they’re doing a great job.  It’s just they don’t have the money to provide the education programs that they used to which enables people know what they’re doing when they are being activists. (Pause) I might even go to their annual meeting in Washington, in late April, on my birthday but I’ll see. /Weak chuckle/

             The other priority is the empowerment of women. That involves a very strong program against violence. And they have established something called “The Week Without Violence” in which they are presenting alternatives to violence in their own program and the programs of other organizations.  It’s apparently caught on fairly well.    They persuaded the world YWCA to recommend it so wives in various countries are doing it now.  It’s a way of showcasing their programs, for one thing ‘cause if they’re talking about alternatives they can talk about childcare, disarmament, and other good things.

Succession

            It’s not that I don’t feel that there isn’t somebody to succeed me; it’s that there isn’t, because everybody who could possibly do it is not available in the daytime.  We’re allowed to have five people on our U.N. team.  We have one wonderful person on our team, she is a consultant so she can go to meetings and write reports, when she’s not working, but then she never knows when she’ll get a job.  She’s been in California *stretched left hand* for the last 6 weeks so we haven’t had much from her, but now she’s back in New York.  And she’s been going to meetings during these two weeks the Commission on the Status of Women is meeting.  I’m sure she went to the International Woman’s Day meeting on Wednesday which was the 8^th.  The others, some of them, they only want to do a piece of the work: some people are only interested in children’s, one woman works with UNICEF force, another one is interested in religion.  

            There’s a lot of organizations that are accredited to the U.N. who are from the churches *circles hand and clenches* and the mosques and other religious groups, so she works with them.  Every year she put on a thing called the Martin Luther King Memorial Day or something like that.  They have a service in the U.N. chapel across the street, it’s called the “Church Center” *crabs hands together*, and then she puts on a soul food lunch in the building there and really it’s the best soul food I’ve ever had. They really know how to cook sweet potato pie.

R.P.: She happens to be black.  She grew up in Louisiana and one time she told me that until she was an adult she was one of the first people to graduate from Yale.  She told me that until she was an adult she knew a great many more Chinese that ordinary white people.

            Well, I recently nominated her for an award.  The YWCA along with it’s elimination of racism program puts on an award.  I don’t approve of awards what I mean when I say that: I mean seems to me you should be putting your efforts into getting the job done instead of writing recommendations.  Well it’s not nice to say I don’t believe in awards when I keep excepting them but, anyway I’ve been writing her up to get this Racial Justice Award because she has really devoted her life to this.

            She really has done everything.  She has this big thing going on with Rosa Parks.  She and her husband have set up a center.  They got 30 acres up in a rural part of New York State and it’s open to anybody who wants to use it.  They’ve got buildings for conferences and then several times a year they have big to do.  On July 4^th they have something called “Let Freedom Ring Day” and they bring people together from all over and they have a program.  She gets out a newsletter and every African American who has made a big contribution, who dies gets a huge spread in her newsletter, or somebody who’s just won something, or written a book, or done something of importance to black people or Asians or any other ethnic group.  She started out as a guide at the United Nations that was her first job, so she has been in touch with all types. 

            Anyway she’s another part of our team and some are better than others but nobody’s willing to take the responsibility for coordinating all of this.  One of the biggest jobs we have to do is to arrange the program for these interns.  The YWCA sends two young women to the United Nations during the two weeks of the Commission on the Status of women which is going on now.  We have to see that they get opportunities to learn as much as they possibly can and that’s a big responsibility.  I’m not there to do it but they’re good kids they’ll be fine.  I’ll see them on Thursday.  I’ll debrief them.

            Nobody has the time to take over my position. They’re working most of them.  Furthermore you really need to hang around there for a long time to know the ropes, as to how to how to speak at meetings, and the documents you need, etcetera.  It takes a long time to learn this.  Even finding your way around the building!  Some of them have been there for several years and they don’t know yet how to get from one place to another.  But somebody will do it, I’m sure, eventually.

Have you ever felt intimidated?

             The thing that is so wonderful about having to do things you didn’t know how to do, the way I have my whole life, and learning how to do them, is that you have a feeling that you’re a professional. You may not have a professional degree but you feel like a professional, and that way you feel you can hold your head up with anybody.

R.P.: I remember going into UN Ballroom and the professionals hold her in great respect

             Well, he *gestures, shakes head and then nods* said it I didn’t but the fact is you feel that you know enough in many cases more than they do.  I was telling somebody the other day that I can remember in Denmark sitting on a couch at a reception between Barbara Ward, one of the world’s most famous economists at that time, marvelous speaker, very attractive woman, and Olga Merdow, who was the prime minister of Sweden.  I was very naïve.  I said to her “Prime minister of Sweden,” I mean I really want to know the answer to this because she really was such a remarkable woman.  I said: “Have you ever felt discriminated against because of your sex?” She said, and I thought this was a wonderful answer: “When you’re at the top nobody discriminates,” so that sums it all up. So I thought ‘I’ve had the answer you’ve got to get to the top.’ /Laugh/

            I’d done a lot of things they hadn’t /laugh/ and it really wasn’t anything I did.  It was jobs that were handed to me.  The fact that I was able to keep my head above water meant that I did them, but it doesn’t mean that I had a great ambition to do these things or to make my mark in the world.  These were jobs that had to be done and no one else was doing them, so who else? I did them.  That gave me a certain feeling that I’d done something in my life.  A lot of people ask me: “I feel so helpless, all these horrible situations in the world and I can’t do anything about it.”  I say: “Yes, you can, send money.” /Laugh/

The Women of Faith award

             That was another accident. I’m a very enthusiastic member of our local Presbyterian church, we have marvelous leadership and so I’m a Presbyterian.  I also know a bunch of people at the national headquarters and one of them is a guy named Bob Smiley, who was my colleague at in the Conference of NGOs.  They gave me an award and then we gave him an award.  So the Presbyterians launched a contest.  They wanted to name three people the woman of the year in different fields one in local government and two in national government and three in international affairs; or maybe it was local affairs, national affairs, and international affairs.  Whatever it was the local person was a woman who’d been on the city council in Cleveland and she had a very interesting story.  The other one was a woman who had been in congress and is now a consultant to the food and agriculture association.  She couldn’t come to Denver where the awards were presented. So Bob Smiley heard about this and he thought I would be a good candidate so he recommended me.  I happened to win not because I’m a good Presbyterian because I really haven’t done anything for the church.

             Anyway, so apparently people voted and they liked my credentials so it really didn’t have much to do with my being an active church worker.  I felt a little bit ashamed of that but never mind.  So I went to Denver.  I had a great time in Denver because I stayed an extra coupla days to find out what they were doing.  And the big issue, of course, is the ordination of gays and lesbians and whether even deacons and elders who are officers of the church can be ordained if they happen to be out.  Some of those people are the most devoted Christians I know so it seems very unjust.  So they had a big hassle over that and they now have come to the point where they’re willing to have local churches decide because, they’ve had such a hard time with it.  People really believe in crusading for the rights of gay and lesbians to serve the lord after all, that’s what their supposed to be doing.

International Leader of Change award form the YWCA

            Unfortunately I wasn’t there. We were going to go.  I have the most beautiful piece of sculpture that they commissioned especially for this award by a noted sculptor in Australian woman. The meeting was held in Australia.  Dick and I were gonna go.  They always invite me as a consultant for their U.N. program and so I’ve been invited to all these meetings.  They have about 500 delegates from their 100 and 20 countries.  We were all set to go and I fell in Denver.  At this other award I smashed my back and Dick got into the hospital with a gall bladder attack and so that was the end of that.

            I didn’t tell the doctor that I had hurt my back, even though it was very painful, because I wanted to come to Hollins ‘cause it was my 65^th reunion and we were determined *slap table* to have a good showing.  I think we had more people there than any other 65^th reunion that’s ever been.  We had 9 dottering old women and one of them was in a wheelchair and one was on a walker.  In spite of my infirmary I walked with Freya and I managed to hold up.  But I didn’t want the doctor to tell me I absolutely couldn’t come so after that, I went to the doctor. (Pause) Anyway, Hollins.  Always.

Relationship with Hollins

            I always thought it was a remarkably good school, and that in spite of all the things I did that had nothing to do with my class work, I got a really good education.  I got a fine education and so I’ve always loved Hollins.  It treated me well and over the years I have done a few things.  I told you that I was invited to the Model Security Council that they were having 15 years ago because I raised some money for them.  I found out they were gonna do it and I got them money. I got a foundation that I was on the Grants Committee to give them some money.  Then they asked me to come and I had a wonderful time participating.  They asked me to come as a consultant and I worked with the people getting their speeches ready and so on.  And it was great thing and then, I didn’t get a chance to do anything else ‘cause I wasn’t asked until very recently

            I was in the elevator across the street from the U.N. in a building that was occupied by the Carnegie Endowment for the Peace.  These kids who were with the Model U.N. were meeting there and one little girl who looked about 12 got into the elevator.  They’d just been assigned their countries and she said: “Zaire, why don’t they give us real countries?” Well of course Zaire was a real country in those days, it’s now Congo again.

R.P.: that was on the level of the congressman who wanted to know what the capital of Africa was

            When the republicans took over the congress there were a lot of new congressman and I was talking to William Bandon Hooval, who was a congress person from New Jersey at some meeting of the League of Women Voters where he was the speaker.  He told me that the United Nations Association, he happened to be president at that time, had offered to come down to Washington and brief the new congressmen.  Most of them were from the south, the new ones, and so they were telling them about the United Nations development work in Africa.  And one guy raised his hand and he said: What is the capital of Africa?  I said to him, “Now, did you tell him: ‘you must be thinking of the organization of African Unity well, their headquarters is in Addis Ababa or maybe you’re thinking of the Economic Commission for Africa?’  And so on in order to not embarrass him?”  I don’t know what he said but I gave him a few pointers

Did you expect to comeback to Hollins?

             Absolutely not. Absolutely not.  I didn’t know how much Hollins would grow on me all these years, but as I said yesterday Hollins got me started on my so-called life work, by recommending me for that one place.  Of course they sent